Trump's Iran war may damage, not improve prospects for Alaska pipeline

S&P Global came away from a major international energy conference in Texas with news that doesn’t bode well for the Alaska project, though it didn’t even mention Alaska in its overview of the world LNG situation.

“This latest shock to the global LNG supply could permanently change global consumption to other energy sources to avoid future shocks. In particular, should regional public policies shift away from natural gas and toward coal or renewables, Asia LNG demand growth may not resurge even under sequentially lower natural gas prices. Such a scenario might require LNG supply curtailment and temporarily shut the U.S. LNG export arbitrage.”

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Dermot Cole Comments
Trump threatens massive war crimes; Sullivan, Begich assent with silence

Alaska’s Republican leaders, with the usual single exception, still have nothing to say about their supreme leader threatening war crimes. Sullivan and Begich cheered Trump’s disastrous decision to go to war.

Their cowardly silence, as Trump bleats that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” is criminal. With Sulllivan and Begich mute and afraid, Sen. Lisa Murkowski is calling out Trump for putting American lives at risk.

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Dermot Cole Comments
Risky and reckless: Bronson wants to double Perm Fund earnings

Former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, one of the legions of Republican candidates for governor, says he wants to more than double the earnings of the Alaska Permanent Fund to pay higher dividends, avoid new taxes and solve the state’s financial woes.

Bronson and his running mate, Fairbanksan Josh Church, are newcomers to state politics, but that doesn’t excuse their cavalier manner. They seem to be unaware that injecting politics into Permanent Fund investments is a terrible idea.

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Dermot Cole Comments
Sullivan backs Trump’s 40 percent military increase, with no taxes to pay for it

What we haven’t heard from Sullivan, a charter member of the Senate DOGE Caucus, is what taxes he supports to pay for the largest military budget in U.S. history, which features an increase of more than 40 percent. Trump introduced the proposal Friday.

The Trump plan endorsed by Sullivan would add $7 trillion to the national debt by 2036, according to this analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

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Dermot Cole Comments
The Permanent Fund at 50

All the expectations for the Permanent Fund were based on conditions that prevailed before the 1979 Iranian revolution when Ayatollah Khomeini became the first supreme leader. Oil prices rose by 250 percent from 1978-1980, changing every calculation about Alaska’s finances and the vision for the Permanent Fund.

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Dermot Cole Comments